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The Far Right Mislabled

I think the labeling of the far right is being misused and distorted to provoke fear and confusion among the people. This strategy is poor and will not work for the left. Let me explain.

Whatever it is that I think about people, I’d like to believe that we are all linked by a few common traits. The one that I’d like to discuss now is the tendency for humans to desire predictability in their expectations of the future. Basically, they wan’t to know what will happen next. This trait molds human behaviors to seek truth and avoid lies. One of the big lies that seems to be doing the rounds is the existence of the populist far right.

I would assert here that when Marie Le Pen gets 21.3% of the votes in a seven horse race, she can’t be considered far right. The same can be said for Brexit, Trump and a host of other supposed far right initiative that exist at present. Lets look at this two ways.

The a plausible method to determine the center of any voter spectrum is to take the most popular opinion and make that the center and build all references to left or right around the center. Anyway you look at it; Trump, Le Pen or Brexit all make good claims at being the center of politics right now. Even if you don’t like my method, I hope you consider that it’s highly unlikely that >20% of the population ever vote for anything that is, contemporaneously, far from the center.

The other way of looking at this issue is to understand that the left/right references to politics came from the court of King Louis the XVI. He put all his advisers that wanted to things to remain as is on his right hand side (the conservatives of the right) and all his advisers that called for change on his left hand side (liberals on the left). Advisers on the far right would be advising for no change what so ever. I can’t see that Marie Le Pen or Trump are advocating for things to remain as they are, clearly they want change.

The real reason that we are using terms like “far right” is either that in a historical context some of Le Pen and Trump’s view would have been conservative or that it is an attempt to frighten people away from supporting the aforementioned politicians. Neither of these reasons feel like truth to the common man/women and so neither will work for left (but it may work from Le Pen and Trump).